Random thoughts, musings, and tech stuff

14 Jun 2013, 06:44

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podRad.io

Last weekend, I decided to try an experiment. I wanted to see how long it would take me to write an MVP podcast client web-app, using AngularJS. Now, I had never written anything with AngularJS before, and had only done some basic reading on the subject. It took me 20-24 hours to write what I’ve got now. PodRad.io is a very simple podcast client, which allows you to subscribe to various podcasts and consume them. Here’s the source on github.

For the most part, working with AngularJS was a good experience, very easy to learn, and within a few hours of starting, I was already parsing xml feeds and playing audio. I spent a few hours on mucking with tools, wasted some time trying to use Intellij (went back to vim after about four or five hours), and spent a decent chunk of time on layout and styling.

Most of the functional stuff was very straight-forward, with a few exceptions. Documentation is ok, but not the best, and there’s clearly a lot to be desired in the current state of data persistence on the web (I ended up simply serializing my data). The suggested tooling was also a bit frustrating, since some critical components lack basic documentation. Overall, however, it moved along much faster than I could have done without the framework.